Influence of Learning Factories on Students’ Success – a Case Study

To successfully deal with economic and technological changes and create competitive advantages based on unique production capabilities, it has become crucial for businesses to ensure production-relevant competencies within their workforce. Learning factories have shown to be a proficient approach to make the development of competencies possible. In literature, a wide variety of different methods to measure competencies can be found, but have to be reworked to fit the conditions of learning factories and their provided trainings. During the presented case study, existing methods are adapted and performed throughout practical exercises in the learning factory CiP (Center for Industrial Productivity) as a part of a lecture held at the PTW at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt). The attained observations are subsequently analyzed. Especially the impact of the examined trainings on the written exam of the lecture is discussed. It can be stated that there are only a handful of methods to measure competencies suitable for the presented case, which have to be adapted first in order to become applicable for measuring competencies within learning factories